School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemDrawing a line: the colonial genesis of the Hume highway( 2006)The colonial archives of the Hume Highway return to an inception narrative containing tropes of intrusion and conflict. In Chapter One a survey of the maps and literature relating to the 1824/5 expedition leads to a discussion of these tropes. The first of these, 'intrusion', concerns the process through which Aboriginal place was first reconfigured as colonial space. Beginning with Hamilton Hume's act of 'drawing a line' through the blank space of a government supplied skeleton chart, this act of intrusion was rapidly followed by the expedition party's penetration into the Aboriginal countries of south-eastern Australia. The second trope, 'tug of war', concerns the rivalry between Hovell, a British free settler, and Hume, a first-generation Australian. Throughout the 1824/5 expedition differences between the two men smouldered, before erupting in controversy in 1855 when Hume published his vitriolic pamphlet Facts. By placing the expedition and these men in their colonial context, Chapter One draws parallels between this conflict and class tensions within the Australian colonies during the same period. Such information enables the reader to appreciate the inception narrative of Chapter Two. How the expedition party made the road during their three and a half month expedition is recreated by drawing from associated exploration texts. By contrasting the explorers' distinct attitudes to the land and the Aborigines, the relationship between the two tropes also becomes evident. As the two men walked the road, so they would write it. Chapter Three examines the key moments and motivations of their controversy. With the publication of Facts 1 in 1855 Hume reasserted his authority over a road since inscribed with the regular traversings of settlement and gold traffic. In doing so, Hume also drew a line through the name of Hovell and ensured that the line in the skeleton chart eventually became known as the Hume Highway.
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ItemThe Moravian-run Ebenezer mission station in north-western Victoria: a German perspective( 1999)This thesis analyses the German perspective of the Ebenezer mission station in north-western Victoria. The German-speaking Moravian missionaries were sent out from Germany in 1859 to civilise and Christianise the Aborigines of this area. Until now the German perspective of the Ebenezer mission station has been neglected, partly because much information is locked up in the German language. Through an analytical descriptive history the missionaries are contextualised in a European and also an Australian setting. This background clearly defines the cultural baggage that the missionaries carried with them to Australia, and how this affected their work at Ebenezer. With this background in mind an analysis of the German language writings in three mediums is conducted, these being: Missionsblatt aus der Brudergemeine (the Moravian mission's global publication), Der australische Christenbote (the journal of the Lutheran Church in Victoria) and also the missionaries diaries and letters that were sent back to Germany. It is shown that the missionaries were aware of the different perceptions that their audiences had and wrote accordingly. Through the missionaries' depiction of other groups an understanding of how the missionaries perceived themselves is formed. Although these depiction of the ‘other’ were different in all three mediums, they always advanced the interests of the missionaries (usually by reinforcing the contemporary cultural hierarchy) and not the ‘other’. The analysis of German language sources leads to a more detailed understanding of the perceptions of the German-speaking missionaries at the Ebenezer mission, and also to the history of the mission itself.